Atelier de Projeto Athens: Archaeology Within the Urban Tissue

Recommended Prerequisites

General knowledge in architecture or archaeology.

Teaching Methods

Students will work in studio mode during class time, with opportunities for peers and tutors critique. They will work collaboratively in teams of architects and archaeologists.

A site visit is going to be followed by recordings (video, photos) and mapping drawings.  Interpreting the site is going to run parallel to strategies of intervention. The proposal is going to be the outcome of the above stage.

Learning Outcomes

Demonstrate an ability to analyze, critically evaluate, and apply relevant areas of scholarship to the design of an architectural project as a contemporary intervention to an archaeological area. Development of new design strategies for different scales of interventions in order to reconnect the fragmented archeological sites to the contemporary urban tissue and public life. Development of various typologies of boundaries between the specified sites and the city - It is through the elaboration of the notion of ‘boundary’ and its design interpretations that one can achieve new relations between the city and the archeological sites.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Within Athens’ urban fabric, the archaeological sites are mainly fenced and conserved as ruins, without being embedded in the urban tissue. Juxtapositions of different temporalities create a fragmented, complex spatiality which is stratified on top of invisible historical precedents. The archaeological site will be seen within the broad urban context. The physical forms of the site, its spatial organization and connection, its natural features and settings, in relation to the ancient and contemporary topography and landscape features is going to be studied and interpreted.

The main emphasis of the studio project lies in the redesign of the boundaries of the urban tissue to the archeological sites in central Athens historical area. A typology of different types of boundaries that will not only allow the networking of the different areas of the city through pedestrian movements, but that could be experienced as ‘areas’ of transition, instead of ‘lines‘ of segregation.

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Research work: 30.0%
Project: 70.0%

Bibliography

Ammerman, A.J., (1996). The Eridanos valley and the Athenian Agora, American Journal of Archaeology 100, 699-715.

Angelakis A. N., L. W. Mays, D. Koutsoyiannis, (2012). Evolution of Water Supply Through the Millennia. London & New York: IWA Publishing.

Camp, J. M.  (1996). Excavations in the Athenian Agora: 1994 and 1995, Hesperia 65, 231-261.

Knigge, U. (1991). The Athenian Kerameikos. History, Monuments, Excavations. Athens: Krene Editions.

Travlos, J. 1981. Athens after the Liberation: Planning the New City and Exploring the Old,  Hesperia 50, 391-407. http://ascsa.net/research?v=default

Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut.  Kerameikos. Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen, vol 1